


Footprints

by kerk_hiraeth



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV)
Genre: Gen, Jesse McNally - Freeform, Mentions of Character Death, Missing Scene, the cost of the job, the ones lost too soon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-26
Updated: 2019-11-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 00:07:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21574225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerk_hiraeth/pseuds/kerk_hiraeth
Summary: ''Some people come into our lives and leave footprints on our hearts and we are never ever the same.''Flavia Weedn (1929-2015)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7





	Footprints

**Author's Note:**

> Until the quote turned up on a wordpress I follow I'd never heard of Flavia Weedn; still can't find out much about her, but the quote didn't take long to inspire this fic, which I actually started writing about the same time I was working on my second Nancy!verse story. Jesse is a character that has always stuck with me. Handful of scenes; killed off in the second half of the pilot and only ever mentioned in fanfic or meta he nevertheless has been in the back of my mind ever since I first saw those opening episodes; sometime between watching the first half of S4 and waiting for the second half to come back into the library. After some re-working; mostly on how Jesse's words (the error is deliberate), and the ending were to be presented, and here we are.

Harvest averted; Slayer and her friends gone, Rupert Giles locked his diary notes away and reached to turn off his desk light; disturbing a piece of paper which fluttered to the floor.

Reaching down in case it was important he was brought up short by the scrawl; realising quickly that it had been meant for his predecessor as Librarian.

_'Mr. Bennett,_ (here there was a hole) _the book. I did find it, as I said I did_ (another hole; so erased it was torn) _there's_ (then) _my next visit_ (another hole) _Mom says I can't do it after school, but I can do chores to pay the fine._

Deciphering the signature took longer, but read, _Jesse Williams_.

~

Years later he could still talk about the note at the funeral of Jesse's mother.

People were impressed that he would travel all the way from England for the parent of a pupil he had never actually met.

He never told them that.

He made a point; after that note, of attending every funeral he could of a parent whose child he had failed to save.

Everyone of them left a footprint; however brief. Every one of them had had people who never knew why the hole in the paper of their lives was so completely erased.

Every one of his children had holes in their lives he could not repair.

Sometimes you had to accept that; find a sticking plaster, and hope that was enough. 

Sometimes the footprints were just washed away.


End file.
